Alnwick

Dusty bottles and coaching inns

In the window of an inn in Alnwick sits a row of dusty bottles that nobody has touched since 1725. That was the year the innkeeper dropped dead of a heart attack while moving them; his wife declared that anyone who shifted them would go the same way, and three centuries later the town has decided not to test her. The pub is now called The Dirty Bottles, dates to the 1600s, and does cocktails and a long food menu alongside its ales. The bottles remain where they are.

Alnwick has more pubs than a town of 8,430 strictly needs, which is a leftover from its coaching days on the Great North Road. The White Swan and the Black Swan were the principal inns where the London-to-Edinburgh mail coaches changed horses; the Black Swan is reckoned by local historians to be the oldest in town, the White Swan the one with the Olympic Suite salvaged from the RMS Olympic, the Titanic's sister ship. For drinking rather than history, the Tanners Arms is the one to find — named for the tanning trade, full of character, and known for "all-local real ales with plenty of new brews to try." The Greys Inn keeps close links with the Alnwick Brewery. The Plough does hearty pies and Sunday roasts and has six rooms above.

Market food and a railway bookshop

Turnbull's has been butchering on Market Street since 1880 and is now onto its sixth generation, with award-winning sausages, homemade pies, and a larger Food Hall out at Willowburn. The Cheese Room on Paikes Street handles the local cheeses. The market runs on the Marketplace every Saturday, Thursdays from April to December, and a farmers' market on the last Friday of the month, spread across the triangle of Bondgate Within, Market Street and Fenkle Street.

The town's most-visited building is a bookshop. Barter Books occupies the old Victorian railway station, closed to trains in 1968, and is one of the largest second-hand bookshops in Europe. In 2000 the owners, Stuart and Mary Manley, found a 1939 "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster in a box of auction books, framed it by the till, and accidentally started a global design industry. You can still eat in the tiled station waiting rooms.

Walking through Hulne Park

For walking, Hulne Park opens daily from 11am to 4pm — no dogs, no bikes — with a signposted loop of about 7.5 miles past the ruins of Hulne Priory, England's earliest Carmelite friary, and up to Brizlee Tower, a Robert Adam folly built in 1781 with views to the Cheviots and the coast.

The castle and its dangerous garden

Alnwick Castle sits above the river, seat of the Percy family for over 700 years, and has stood in for Hogwarts, Downton, and a Transformers film. In the grounds the Duchess of Northumberland's Poison Garden keeps more than a hundred toxic plants behind locked gates and 24-hour security.

Arrivals and Shrovetide football

Alnmouth station, four miles east, puts you on the East Coast Main Line, and the A1 runs just past the edge of town. On Shrove Tuesday the Duke throws a ball from the castle battlements and two parishes spend the afternoon trying to carry it across a field.